Portfolio Spotlight: HomeAid National Capital Region

HomeAid National Capital Region (previously known as HomeAid Northern Virginia) is a noble, non-profit organization whose singular aim is to end homelessness.

They connect like-minded builders, housing industry professionals, and other non-profits to renovate or build homeless shelters, housing facilities, and other non-profit spaces.

Everything—time, expertise, and resources—is donated by HomeAid’s Builder Captains and Trade Partners.

HomeAid also creates even more goodwill by giving welcome baskets to the new beneficiaries of their hard work, as well as organizing events like diaper drives.

Quite simply, they are a great group of people doing great things to help communities all over the National Capital Region.

But HomeAid National Capital Region’s website had a problem. Let’s take a look.

HomeAid’s Website Needed Help

HomeAid’s website needed to tell their story, update their audience on recent news, and be a resource for volunteers who wanted to get involved and help. It also needed to recognize and celebrate all the Builder Captains, Trade Partners, Corporate & Foundation Donors, and Non-Profit Partners.

The problem was: HomeAid’s website was, for lack of a better word, broken. Their search box wasn’t returning accurate and trustworthy results. They were unable to post updates on their own and, unfortunately, couldn’t get a response from the agency that built the site to fix it.

To further complicate matters, their national parent organization had just rebranded. HomeAid National Capital Region’s website needed to be fixed and reflect both the rebranding and their new name—as they were still known as HomeAid Northern Virginia at the time—and their web presence needed major help.

Luckily for HomeAid, many of our fantastic clients also volunteer to assist in HomeAid’s mission. One of those clients introduced HomeAid to our AdsIntelligence team, and then the hard-but-rewarding work began!

AdsIntelligence to the Rescue

We were initially asked to just fix a few things, but upon examination, we realized the problems went far deeper than expected. HomeAid’s failing site was built as a rigid and modular website, which made any sort of editing extremely difficult. To put it in real estate terms, it had a bad foundation.

We quickly realized we couldn’t just do a quick polish or patchwork job and feel good about ourselves—that wouldn’t be the best outcome for such a worthy client, even though it would be a bigger investment of our time. As with all our clients, we wanted HomeAid to have a website that worked as it should, didn’t cut corners, looked and performed amazingly, and would serve them well (both functionally and aesthetically) for years to come. We needed to build them a brand-new website!

After working with HomeAid to understand their needs and desires for their website, we better understood our task at hand. The next step was to break down what they already had. We then worked closely together to prioritize and reorganize their assets, and restructure the flow of their entire site. Now, we were ready to rebuild on a clean, new platform.

And rebuild we did! We incorporated the HomeAid national organization’s new branding and helped create a new identity for the HomeAid National Capital Region. With our plan in place, the only thing left to do was put our plan in motion!

This was a massive project, to say the least, but one that we felt was truly deserving the donation of all our dedication, time, and hard work. In the end, our labor of love gave HomeAid National Capital Region the responsive, dynamic website they needed. It’s a website that is in-line with their new branding standards, able to be easily updated and maintained by the clients themselves, and, most importantly, quick for anyone interested in HomeAid to learn more and get involved.

Thanks, HomeAid, for the opportunity to contribute our talents to help your noble cause.